Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Staunton, April 30 – Patriarch Kirill
says that the Russian Orthodox Church’s canonical territory currently includes
all the countries that had been part of the USSR plus China and Japan, and his
aides say that it could expand to include other countries where the Russian
Church has taken the lead in missionary activity.

Archpriest Igor Yakimchuk, secretary
of the Patriarchate’s council for relations with Orthodox churches, told the
magazine that the term “canonical territory” is now used quite frequently, it
has only recently been given definition in the Russian Church by a decision of
senior clerics earlier this year.

The term itself is “formally lacking
in traditional canonical texts,” he said, but “the absence of the term does not
mean the absence” of an understanding of the idea. Indeed, the canonical
borders of the Russian Orthodox Church are referred to at church councils of
the Eastern patriarchates as early as 1590 and 1593.

The ancient church did not need the concept,
Yakimchuk continued, because there did not exist major formations larger than
individual parishes or bishoprics, “but with time, larger structures began to
be formed, and the necessity arose of canonically regulating the borders among
them.”

The Eastern churches generally assumed the
borders they have today in the Byzantine period, he said, but “the church
borders of this or that Church can be broadened” to other territories where
they have conducted missionary work. That is why China and Japan are part of
the Russian Church’s canonical territory.

Another
“important moment” related to this, Yakimchuk said, is that the canonical space
of a church is based on territory rather than statehood. “States may disappear
or appear, their borders may contract or expand, but these changes do not mean
the automatic shift of church borders.”

Asked what happens when “historically
a certain territory belongs now to one patriarchate and then to another,” such
as for example in Bessarabia, the patriarchate official said that chronology is
defining: “If in the course of 30 or more years, the borders between two” such
churches “are not disputed, they cannot be changed unilaterally.”

As far as Western Europe concerned, the
situation is still confused. A century ago, Yakimchuk said, “no one could
imagine” that there would be “hundreds of Orthodox congregations.” But now
there are, and to whom they should be subordinate will be the subject of an
upcoming Universal Orthodox Assembly.

Opinion on this subject is divided
between those who support the right of any autocephalous church to control the
parishes near it and those who believe that there should be a more rational
division of labor among the traditional Orthodox churches of the world. The
Moscow Patriarchate favors the former position, but believes it must emerge “naturally”
rather than by fiat, a process that will “require not a little time and
patience.”

Staunton,
April 30 – Even though Daghestan forms only two percent of the population of the
Russian Federation and only 12 percent of that country’s historically Islamic
nations, residents of that North Caucasian country will again this year form
half of the Russian contingent on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a measure of just
how Islamic that republic is.

At a press
conference in Makhachkala yesterday, Magomedrasud Omarov, spokesman for the
Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Daghestan, and Akhmed Khabibov, who helps
organize support for hajis from the republic, talked about the state of the haj
in that extremely religious North Caucasus republic (riadagestan.ru/news/2013/4/29/156068/).

Omarov said that
Daghestan had been given a quota of 8,000 haj slots this year, some 500 fewer
than last year, because of increasing demands from Muslims in other parts of
the Russian Federation, but that he expected that Daghestanis would, as they
have in the past form about half of the 20,500 slots that the Saudis have given
Moscow this year as in the past several.

(In fact, at
least over the last four or five years, hajis from the Russian Federation have,
despite these quotas, often numbered far more. In 2011, for example, Saudi
officials said that almost 40,000 Muslims from Russia made the haj, and Riyadh
has put increasing pressure on the Russian authorities to rein in their
citizens in this regard.)

One reason that the number of Daghestani hajis is so large
is that there are a number of charity organizations in that republic who fund
the pilgrimage of those who otherwise could not afford it. One donor alone,
Suleyman Kerimov, reportedly will be financing some 3,000 Daghestanis again
this year.

Omarov
noted that “there have been years when Daghestan received as many as 12,000 or
even more haj slots.” He said that the faithful in Daghestan should see the
decline as something positive because it means that Islam is “strengthening” in
other parts of the Russian Federation.

According
to the MSD spokesman, since the end of Soviet times, “one can boldly assert
that the number of Daghestani pilgrims totals approximately one million,” a
figure that he said does not include those who have visited the holy places
outside of the haj times. If that is true, then almost one in every three
Daghestanis may have made the haj.

Omarov
added that Moscow has done everything it can to simplify the process of
obtaining the necessary travel documents for Daghestani hajis.“Over the last three years,” he said, “there
has not been a single case when an individual was not able to take part in the
haj” because of problems with OVIR.

Staunton, April 30 – A new survey of
sudents in the Kabardino-Balkarian capital of Nalchik on the nature, sources
and support of their ethnic, civic, and religious identities found that only
one in every 33 said the Internet was a major way for them to maintain ties to
groups they identify with, despite their frequent use of the Internet for their
studies.

That finding, just one of many
intriguing observations offered in a report posted online at the end of last
week, suggests the need to revise some of the assumptions many observers
currently about the role of the world wide web in defining how young people,
let alone others, in the North Caucasus, view themselves (caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=21139).

Under
the direction of Islam Tekushev, members of the Prague-base Medium-Orient
Information Agency interviewed during the second half of February 2013 235
students of various nationalities between the ages of 16 and 30 at the three
higher educational institutions in Nalchik concerning the mix and hierarchy of
identities they have.

The
researchers published their findings for the group as a whole, for Kabardinian
women, for Kabardinian men, for Balkar men and for Balkar women, an arrangement
that highlights both the similarities and differences among these various
categories concerning identity.

Asked
which social group they most identified with, members of the sample as a whole
pointed to their ethnic community (72 percent), their status as citizens of the
Russian Federation (66 percent), and their membership in a particular religion
(44 percent). Respondents were allowed to list up to three.

Forty-six percent of the sample said
that they chose to identify with a particular group because it provides them with
a defense of their ethnic righs, “above all the development of national culture
and language,” while 30 percent said that the group gave them personal
security,, and 27 percent said it helped them achieve materialwell-being.

At the same time, 24 percent of
the respondets said that they chose the group because it could ensure the
defense of their religious rights, and 11 percent specified that their group
membership helped provide them with “defense against the arbitrariness of
government organs, above all the police and the tax bodies.”

Regarding the institutions to which
they turn for support of their identities, 47 percent of the sample said they
used their parents, somewhat fewer their friends, but only three percent
mentioned the Internet, even though as students they use the world wide web
almost on a daily basis.

The differences among the Kabardinians and the
Balkars on certain questions were enormous, even at a general level.
Seventy-two percent of the Kabardinians but only seven percent of the Balkars
said they had a positive or generally positive attitude toward members of other
ethnic groups. Only four percent of each had a negative view of the other.

Most of the report about this survey
concerns the attitudes of four groups: Kabardinian women, Kabardinian men,
Balkar women and Balkar men. Among the Kabardinian women, 34.2 percent
identified with all three kinds of identity (ethnic, religious and civic) and
only 5.7 percent identified solely with a religious one.

Among the Kabardinian men, 27.5
percent of the men identified with all three identities, andonly five percent
with religion alone.Their preference
for two or three identities, “one of which is religion,” gives them “a feeling
of defense against the risks of being an object of discrimination or
persecution.”

Unlike their female counterparts,
the male Kabardinians were more likely to include religion in their identity
mix and more likely to say that the rights of the members of their community
were being violated, with 70 percent of the sample agreeing with the assertion
that these rights are at risk.

At the same time, 62 percent of the
male Kabardinians list civic identity as part of their identity mix, an
indication of the “quite high influence of [non-ethnic] Russian civic identity
on the representatives” of the young in KBR and on the belief among that group
that civic identity can also help defend them against the challenges they face.

The situation with regard to the
Balkars, women and men, is somewhat different, the study found, perhaps a
reflection of their minority status in the republic. (According to the 2010
census, the Balkars form 12.7 percent of the population while the Kabardinians
form 57.2 percent and the Russians 22.5 percent.)

Balkar women were somewhat more
likely to declare a mixture of identities than Kabardinian ones. And they were
somewhat less likely to declare a clearly defined religious identity. Indeed,
the authors of the study found, Balkar women listed religion only alongside
other identitites rather than separately.

Balkar men also differed from their
Kabardinian counterparts.Far more (62.5
percent) said their identity included all three elements, civic, ethnic, and
religious, with fewer identifying purely in religious or ethnic terms and with
more not being willing or able to identify themselves in any of these terms at
all. None preferred exclusively civic or exclusively religious identities.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Staunton, April 29 – Reductions in
the number of men drafted from the North Caucasus supposedly to combat
dedovshchina in the ranks and then Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s promise to
restore at least part of the draft quota for that region have sparked questions
in that region which have serious political consequenes.

In an article on the FLNKA.ru portal
on Friday, Milrad Fatullayev, the editor of the Daghestani weekly, “Nastoyashchyeye
vremya” and a contributor to Moscow’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” argues that perhaps
the most serious is “do we live in a single country?” -- or at least a common
legal space? (flnka.ru//2136-armiya-esche-odna-liniya-raskola.html).

With regard to
the reduction and then elimination of draft quotas for the North Caucasus
repubics, Fatullayev says, there is an obvious question: “On what basis” was
that decision taken? What were its legal foundations?The answer of course, that there weren’t any,
and no one has explained why this happened.

If draftees violate military rules,
they must be disciplined, and if the military fails to do that or decides that
the only way it can cope with such violations is not to draft people from one
or another region, Fatullayev continues, then it is clear that “the state
system cannot cope with draftees who violate the law.” Moreover, such a step is
“a crude violation of the Constitution and of human rights.”

Such questions are especially urgent
now that Moscow has decided to restore all quotas in whole or in part.That too requires an explanation, the editor
continues, and it is obvious that in this case too “the law isn’t working.”And involving the republics in supervising
draftees from them is not only a diversion but itself a violation of the
constitution and laws.

Daghestanis “want to serve,”
Fatullayev says. If one of them doesn’t or if he will not live according to the
military rules, then he should be discharged from the military and sent
home.Only “those who are required or
those who want to serve” should be in the military. “I don’t see problems here,”
the editor argues.

Those who don’t want to serve and
are sent home certainly know that they won’t get a position in the police or the
force structures or possibly elsewhere in the bureaucracy, but that is their
choice.

Why then did the Russian military
behave in this way?“It is possible,”
Fatullayev writes, “that the former army leadership calculated that if there
were to be a large number of Caucasians in the Russian army this would be a
threat to Russian statehood” because those who served could use the skills they
obtained against the state.

But imposing “such
limitations on the basis of ethnicity is not only a crudely mistaken but also a
criminal decision of the higher leadership of the Army,” Fatullayev argues, but
it represents a clear “path to the segregation of the country along ethnic,
territorial, religious and other lines.”

“A situation when the laws of the Russian
Federation are applied selectively to its territories, nationalities or
confessional groups is one road that leads the country to collapse” because it
is “yet another line of division.” And what makes the whole situation still
worse is that limitations applied to North Caucasians were not applied to the
Muslims of the Middle Volga.

The General Staff took this decision
on its own, without legal basis, and tried to hide it, first cutting back
quotas – seven times, according to Fatullayev’s information -- under the guise of a reduction in overall
force levels and then finally forced to provide some kind of explanation when
the military could not hide what it was doing any longer.

This whole sad story – the reduction
of quotas, the return of quotas, and the establishment of special oversight
responsibilities to North Caucasus governments is not only illegal but “speaks
about the weakness of the state, about the weakness of the administration, and
about laws which do not work.”

Residents of the North Caucasus are
now asking themselves questions like: “Do we live in a single country?” “Do the
laws apply to all alike independently of ethnicity or territory?” “Can we trust
such a state?” and “Does the state trust us or not?” Clear and precise answers
to these questions are absolutely “necessary.”

“If the state does not trust an
entire region,” he says, “that means that the residents of this region have a
logical basis for having doubts about their trust in this state,” which appears
to view them as aliens or worse, good only to be “driven into national,
political or some other reservations.”

The
fact that these questions are being asked represents a serious political
problem, he argues; the fact that they have not yet been answered represents a
potentially even more serious one.